


Cutting room floor

by Transistance



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Canon Trans Character, Clothing, Dysphoria, Gender Dysphoria, Sewing, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 20:32:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7772098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing fits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cutting room floor

**Author's Note:**

> Alright alright alright, lads, in no relation to this particular fic (which I didn't intend to write, but it's here now), I have An Announcement. If you're just here for another Angsty Gender-centric Fic then fire on right ahead, but if you're here bc you know me as an author then you may want to read this bit here!  
> (this is pooly written bc it's 2am, sorry)  
> Okay I'm headed off to uni in 20 days' time; will be Away from then until ~mid december. **I will not be writing, reading or commenting during that time**.  I will not be on here at all, bc it's directly bad for my social and academic abilities and also somehow takes a whole wedge of time out of the day. I'll show up again once I get home for the holiday, but obviously having not been writing I won't have anything immediate to offer. I'll probably read everything that I've missed in the reaper tags though. Will I still have any interest in kuroshitsuji? Will my mind instead be totally hung up on particle physics? Who knows! Not me. I'll miss the lot of you, but far better telling you where I'm off to rather than just disappearing. And almost 3 weeks' notice, too!  
> If you'lll miss my stories at all - sorry. Not much I can do about that. If you'll miss my comments I can only suggest that you go out and spend some time commenting on ther people's stuff more, because everyone in this wee community is a honey and a) deserve more love and b) _will probably return the favour_.  That's a fun cheat-code to Making Friends Online. It's all tit for tat. Be nice to people!! It's a good thing to do!  
>   
> You've all been remarkably kind to me for my writing, and please know that I am so, so grateful.  
> So - bye!  
> 

Things don't fit and things don't fit and that really is the heart of the problem: things do not fit.

It's clothes, mostly. Clothes and cosmetics and ~~not her body~~ mannerisms and habits. They don't fit her, not as they should, not as they do other people. Grell loves clothes. Human fashion is perhaps at its peak and shinigami work-wear is dull, dull, dull and drab and _dire_. So she takes jaunts and comes back to her little quiet home with bagfuls of items which she hasn't bothered to try on, because for all their beauty and their self-professed worth they will not fit, and she knows it.

Women's clothes do not fit. They sit too tight around her thickset middle, dense with muscle that will never allow any semblance of a wasp-waist to pass. They hang loose and puffy on her planed chest, skirts too high on her long, strong legs, shoes clinging in vipers grips to her spade feet. They're made for people who aren't like her, always the other woman, the pretty short woman with curves and breasts and high pitched laughter and a charming smile that's not filled with knives. Clothes are not made for monsters who can call only the bare minimum relation to humanity their own. Women's clothes are not tailored to ~~the bodies of men~~ people like Grell.

~~People like her are not allowed happiness, after all. Not even in small bursts. Not even little things so simple as clothes.~~

Sewing is an escape – no, a solution to the problem. Grell can sew. It has taken her years, years, years to perfect, to learn the craft as women should and perfect the at as a seamstress might, because God knows nobody else is going to make clothes that fit. Women's clothes that fit. Men's clothes fit her body perfectly, easy as reaps, easy as death, but nonetheless in their own stubborn way they do not _fit_. They don't fit her because they're styled for men and she's a woman! So to even imagine that they are in any way attractive is ridiculous, obviously. Obviously. Women in suits look obscene.

Crossing stitches and taking out hems and darting busts makes her feel a little better. Although it would perhaps be fastest to run the articles through in batches, she never does. Each item is appraised and edited individually, as a unique and isolated concept, each worked from its previous mould to a shape that will, if not _fit_ , at least come close to complementing her body. Each becomes _hers_ , more so than any mere legal ownership can command. The only clothes that are more hers than these reworked miracles are those that she fabricates herself, the patterns her own alongside the colours and the graft, but these she has all too few of. There's so much potential to make mistakes, sew lines too tight and bodices too small because the garments she's used to looking at are for slimmer women, little flighty things who do need heels and hats to look in any way intimidating. She knows her own measurements, of course. They're about average for a m ~~an~~ \- someone like she's expected to be. Too many little numbers which can't lie, but don't fit nonetheless.

People – other people, people she works with, people she flirts with, people she meets – they see the stitches, she's sure of it. They see all of the little crosshatched take-ins and the mismatched threads and the slight irregularities on the seams, revealing her to be a faux beauty, a straw woman. And even if they were blind as moles her voice betrays her, too deep, too deep, too deep and low and even when she tries to hitch it up it slips. Plummets down right through her ugly awful big flat feet.

Who is she supposed to be? The capable reaper, the _man_ , Grell Sutcliff, aggressive, aggressive, competent unhinged flighty flirty reprobate who acts too fast and considers too little? Or the woman, Grell Sutcliff, everything above and everything else that people don't take time to see – nights spent alone, clawing at the roots of her endless hair (beautiful, feminine, it fits, it _fits_ ); the time behind the needle, working her hands raw to make the clothes that always come to her with treachery in mind ease into an advantage; the creature, translucent, who walks winding paths through gardens and touches the dew-wet heads of roses. The men who choose the ignominy of fucking an incomplete monster as she is seem not to care so much for the latter, even if they call her s _he_ , even if they're sweet and kind and do their god-damned best. They'll taste her lipgloss but feel the harsh masculinity beneath, and pretend that she can be both, that she should be both, not able to comprehend that she is always always neither.

It's funny, how close night-gowns come to fitting, how close they _should be_ to fitting; how it's always her own body that betrays them and makes them unsuitable for her, for sleep, for anything. It's funny, how a scratchy old pair of men's pyjamas that still smell like she did when she was a junior and are wearing sheer from years still hold more familiarity than such beautiful articles. Sure, that's not a part of her that she'd show to others. Sure, it's not as if they'd see it anyway.

She hurts she hurts and hurts and hurts and she's supposed to be okay, she is supposed to be a fighter, vicious, vibrant, a super n o v a in a sky full of spreading black holes, but she's held together by the pulls of others' orbits and her own gas nebula is dying. It siphons off her, incomplete and ill-suited to such a red giant's burst, not fitting, because nothing fits.

Grell wonders, sometimes, if other people could be persuaded to see her – _her_ , not her height, not her voice, not her body but just _her_ – if she'd feel so ill at ease in her own skin (is it her skin? It doesn't resemble a woman's shell and she is nothing more or less than a woman, but perhaps it doesn't have to; perhaps reaction and interactions are what count and perhaps those, the _he_ s, _he, he, he, his him he himself_ , are what put the hole in her side in the first place). She likes clothes that sit well on her body – complement it as if she were a man, because even though she's flat chested and endowed as women aren't it shouldn't bother her because it's just a body. But she can't wear them because people look her up and down and don't recognise the woman, and even with her hair and makeup and cracked, swinging voice they merely think her odd, not wrong. They think her a him and address her as such, because if a woman were a woman she would dress to convey that except that Grell can't because women's

clothes

do

not

fit.

And if she dresses like a man nobody can see the seams.

**Author's Note:**

> Uh
> 
> Sorry?


End file.
